$1B ads business revenue hands OpenAI fresh boost in record IPO push
OpenAI is trying to prove it can earn money from more than subscriptions as it prepares for a public listing with a valuation above $1 trillion.
How much revenue did ChatGPT generate through ads?
OpenAI reported that its ChatGPT advertising business generated $1 billion in annualized revenue within fewer than 200 days of launch.
In its announcement, OpenAI said its revenue comes from “consumer subscriptions, enterprise offerings, and usage-based APIs,” and now advertising.
Ads currently reach users on ChatGPT’s free tier and its lower-cost Go plan. OpenAI puts ChatGPT’s free plan audience at more than 1 billion weekly active users, and the advertising model is what helps keep the free version running.
Tens of thousands of advertisers now buy space, and the company said small and medium businesses have become a “material share of the business” since it opened a self-service Ads Manager in May.
As of August, the self-serve buying feature was available in more than 40 countries. It is now open to marketers across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
India, as one of ChatGPT’s largest markets by weekly users, received the rolled out ads last week with 50 brands and the agencies WPP and Omnicom on board. A self-serve tool for Indian marketers is set to open on September 4, with a daily minimum spend of ₹725, or about $7.60.
Earlier this year, OpenAI added cost-per-click billing, which charges only when someone clicks, and it dropped a $50,000 minimum spend when it opened the platform to all U.S. businesses.
Did OpenAI always intend to have ads on ChatGPT?
OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman once bristled at the idea of including ads on the platform, telling a Harvard audience in May 2024 that mixing ads and AI felt “uniquely unsettling” and called advertising a “last resort.”
Anthropic built its first Super Bowl campaign around mocking OpenAI’s move into ads, portraying a chatbot that twists user questions into emotional pitches. Altman called the trolling “funny” but “clearly dishonest.”
OpenAI maintains that the ads are clearly labeled and do not interfere with the answers its chatbot provides. Buyers also cannot see what users type in private.
OpenAI reported $6.7 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up from $5.7 billion the quarter before, but it also posted a $38.5 billion net loss in 2025 on $13.07 billion of revenue. The company is targeting $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and total annualized revenue above $40 billion, which is roughly double its reported figures at the end of 2025.
Despite its impressive financial projections and performance, Cryptopolitan has reported that at least 14 executives left OpenAI in 2026, feeding doubts about the near $1 trillion valuation it wants to carry into public markets.
Anthropic is expected to list first while OpenAI said in June that its own debut “may be a while.”
Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.
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